Just over a year ago Jeff Bezos the founder and CEO of Amazon purchased The Washington Post newspaper. This immediately led to quite a few rumors and assumptions on the logic behind such an acquisition. After all newspapers are now generally considered to be quite dated (in concept) compared to Amazon which can be seen as the opposite and more resembling of the future of media. If The Washington Post is a book then Amazon is the Kindle. How was Bezos intending on combining these two entities? Was he even intending to combine them?

Well Bezos’s intention seems a lot clearer now. A report today from Businessweek advises of what is being called ‘Project Rainbow’. In short Rainbow is the Post’s attempt to create an app version of the newspaper which will be subscription based and rolled out across electronic devices in an attempt to attract a new and viably sustainable audience. According to the report the folks at the Post have been working on Rainbow for some time and the actual content will be a highly curated selection of news and photos taken from the main daily newspaper. However in attempting to attract the new and more modern readers the app will adopt a more magazine-like design which will be highly geared towards a tablet format.

So what’s the Amazon angle? Well, this is simple. Rainbow is now highly expected to be first launched on Amazon’s Kindle devices. For the Amazon users this will come packaged as a free subscription which will be the big selling point from Amazon’s point of view. Following the initial Amazon release it is then expected Rainbow will be further rolled out to non-Kindle Android and Apple devices but unlike Kindle owners, it will come tagged with a monthly subscription price. At present there are no firm details on when the app will be available or released and also no details on what the likely non-Amazon subscription price will be. Instead the only firm details which can be reported is that the collaboration between Amazon and The Washington Post is real and will be happening soon enough. Any Kindle readers out there? Looking forward to a free subscription to a magazine based version of The Washington Post? What about you non-Kindle owners? Are you willing to pay a monthly price for the Rainbow? As always let us know what you think.